


i can picture us waltz in the ruins of this wilted grey contusion

by HATECADILLAC



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Bleak, Canonical Character Death, Dangan Ronpa Spoilers, Decapitation, Domestic, Dreams, Fantasizing, Ishimaru Kiyotaka as Ishida | Kiyondo, Love Confessions, M/M, Minor Violence, Mutually Unrequited, Present Tense, Psychological Drama, Short One Shot, Surreal, Teen Romance, im now 2 for 2 on weird ass ishida fics, this was going to be a normal domestic fic but then something activated in my brain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:14:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26160061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HATECADILLAC/pseuds/HATECADILLAC
Summary: Ishida loses his head. Somewhere else, Taka washes Mondo's hair.
Relationships: Ishimaru Kiyotaka/Oowada Mondo
Kudos: 64





	i can picture us waltz in the ruins of this wilted grey contusion

The dream always starts the same way—Ishida wandering the halls, clumsily groping his way around the way he’s sure he must be doing in his sleep sometimes from how unrested he is when he wakes. Odd and dream-like as it is, he can make out his surroundings just fine, which is always strange to him, because he doesn’t have a head. First time he had the dream he brought his hands up to the smooth stump of his neck and screamed upon feeling the hot unnatural flesh there, and it had been a nightmare. Now it’s normal—though he walks stited and hasty missing the weight of it, and still takes care not to touch the half-wound that’s left. He knows he has to find it, that that is the trajectory of the dream every time, and by now he can do it in his sleep—well, no pun intended. He just sighs and wanders on, searching idly, trying to do it on autopilot; he holds onto the hope that if he goes enough out of focus he can watch Taka’s dream instead. Taka’s dream, which is the same every time too but is so much nicer, which fills him with a warmth out of context, a warmth he craves even if he knows it isn’t his.

—

It’s always hard to see at first, through all the steam in the room, but the scene goes clear soon enough—Mondo with his knees up to his chest in the bathtub, Taka leaning over him and lathering his long hair full of indeterminately scented shampoo. Ishida used to find it funny, that cracking a teenage boy’s brain into a frying pan got you something so prudish and domestic, the world’s most anti-climactic Penthouse letter. _I never thought it would happen to me_ , only the joke was that it didn’t, and that wasn’t very funny for very long.

They’re never in the dorm bathrooms at Hope’s Peak, though Ishida can’t pinpoint another place. It has to be somewhere that exists only in Taka’s memory, wherever that is, far away and hiding behind him as a shield. All he knows is that the tile is so white it nearly blinds him, radiating blasting light out, creating some variation on Heaven. Far away from Hope’s Peak, escaped, away from time or definite place with nothing to think about but this moment, this action.

Taka washes Mondo’s hair, and it is so impossibly full of junk that needs to be shed: stale product, errant hairs, clumps of dirt and leaves and sticks like he’d been rolling around in a forest outside (a foreign concept to Ishida, born to die in Hope’s Peak, but it aches still). Often blood, so much blood that sheets over Mondo’s face and Taka’s hands that you would think it’d have to turn the water the same nauseous bright pink—but the bath always stays fresh and benign, tastefully censoring Mondo’s body. Taka works on this job—because it _is_ a job—with the same ambition he goes about or went about everything else he does, eyes flashing bright and determined, but there’s something softer and unfamiliar there. The thing that he never said or showed, the thing that makes him have these dreams, the thing he can express only here.

He does his duty in total silence, rinsing out Mondo’s hair from a tupperware container at the side of the bath, and the only sound is that cascading water until Mondo winces—flinches away from Taka’s fingers as he can’t resist running them through the damp curtain that now lies against his neck and muscular back. 

“Fuckin’ _pulls_ ,” He half-snarls through his teeth; Ishida clings to this, never having heard Mondo’s voice for real. His only memory of it is through Taka, only like this.

“It wouldn’t pull if you combed it more,” Taka explains with an unamused frown, and Mondo grumbles and pulls his knees in tighter—the defanged indignation of a person who is being cared for for the very first time in their short life.

“It’s really long...It makes sense, I guess, but I never thought about it. It all goes up—”

“Yeah, it just all goes up.”

“You should try wearing it different ways. Like braids or something.”

Mondo frowns again. “It’d make me look like a girl.”

But Taka meets him with a shit-eating grin, unabashedly happy, the kind of face he will never ever make again in the real world. “Maybe, yeah, but a cute girl.”

And in this genderless miracle world, it is a statement that can exist unburdened, with no baggage, a revisionist history where Mondo does not cry or kill but settles his shoulders and says nothing, except to look at Taka like he can’t believe he made it here, that this is really happening to him.

They talk about nothing, but it means everything—never about the agony of their school lives, never about killing games, just classes and extracurriculars and magazines and TV shows and _living_. Living a life neither of them got but both of them deserved, the fantasy of different circumstances, life as normal boys. Normal life in a world where there is a God, or else where the universe is a little kinder and a little more forgiving. After all, it is Taka’s dream, the one place he cannot repress indulgence, and isn’t it human nature? To want something you can never have?

Sometimes if Taka is feeling bold, from whatever dark corner he occupies where no one but him can see how desperate he is, he’ll confess it outright once he’s done— _I love you, bro._ And Mondo will laugh, but Taka’s face will prove that its no joke, in fact the most serious thing in the universe. Mondo understands and his face goes just the same, and they stare at each other, confrontational and wanting. They only ever kiss once, mutually leaning forward over the edge of the bathtub, the substitute for Taka’s first kiss he’ll never have. Ishida woke up after that dream, hands scrabbling to his face in search of security for his head, and discovered his cheeks were wet like he’d wept the whole night through. They never say anything else after that, but that phrase echoes between them, picking up decibels every time in a feedback loop: _I love you, I love you, I LOVE YOU._

Other times Taka just says “Dry off and I’ll comb your hair,” and it means the same thing.

Most of the time, though, Taka leans back on his knees to examine his handiwork, and something in him deflates. His shoulders droop and you can watch it leave him, through the eyes and nose, dissipating into the room’s ambience with a sigh like so much steam wafting off a hot bath. Mondo senses it too, and turns to him, frowning.

“I miss you,” is all Taka says, plain and simple.

Mondo opens his mouth as though to say _I’m right here, dumbass,_ then closes it again, understanding. He, too, sighs—leans forward in lieu of talking and rests his head on Taka’s shoulder over the lip of the bath, crossing the barrier with the slap of wet hair on fabric. He is the only person Taka would ever let do it, sickened anywhere else by the marring of his uniform, and he lets Mondo do it in the dream because he will never do it when Taka is awake. 

Neither boy cries. They breathe in tandem, together on that intimate level, because this is Taka’s beautiful dream, and it’s human nature to want something that you can never have.

—

Sometimes Ishida’s head is in the trash room. Other times it is in the sauna, or in Mondo’s room, or in one locker room or the other—he cannot differentiate between girls or boys, too preoccupied by the hot pink stain on the carpet that spreads even now. Most of the time, though, he has to take the elevator down, down, down, to where it waits for him in the center of a ring of empty chairs under the presiding of an absent judge.

Every time he finds it, he can’t help being disappointed. It’s smaller than he expects it to be, sad and comical in its displacement, and he has to resist the urge to just kick it like a soccer ball and get it away from him. Is it really his? Dull and unwashed black hair, eyes shut and crusted over with sleep dust, blood high in the cheeks from his perpetual shame? Sometimes it has a dent in it, contextless wound at the top of the skull dripping pink down his forehead, and it reminds Ishida so much of a bruised fruit, past its prime, forgotten and then rejected.

But he bends at the knees with a distant creak of his joints and picks it up anyways, puts it in its rightful spot on his neck, and wakes up. What else can he do? There’s a weight you carry, a weight you curse but can’t hate from sheer familiarity, and you carry it forever until the end, when you finally become that sad and dented head and you can finally exhale out.


End file.
